​Recently, former television personality Scott Wolter appeared on the Earth Ancients radio show to discuss the Knights Templar in North America, and the interview started off about as badly as possible when the host, Cliff Dunning, asked Wolter to describe the “earliest” European arrival in the New World, which established that our host is basically trolling for white pride. This becomes clearer when Dunning returns to the question at the end and rephrases “European” into “pre-Native,” suggesting that he sees the first Americans as white. To his credit, Wolter redirected the question to Native American oral traditions, though these are rather fantastical claims about Native American “world elders” who claim to meet with representatives from every continent in the world every eight years, and have for tens of thousands of years. I need not note that there is no evidence of global confabs in Ice Age America—where communication across the continent was already a challenge, let alone globally—but perhaps it is an imaginary version of the more recent “World Elders Forum” of the past few years that brings together indigenous leaders from around the world.

​Dear God, there’s another one. It’s only been a couple of days since I reviewed Xaviant Haze’s Ancient Giants, and now we have an even worse entry in the canon of ancient mysteries books to contend with. This one is especially appropriate because it comes to us from the pen of Frank Joseph, formerly known as Frank Collin, the ex-head of the National Socialist White People’s Party and the National Socialist Party of America. In a month when a former American Nazi Party leader is running unopposed to secure the Republican nomination for an Illinois congressional seat (which he will likely lose since it is a heavily Democratic district), it just seems right to see what the other former Nazi leader in the public eye is up to. Yes, he is still promoting white interests, just more subtly. 

​If you made a world-changing discovery that could prove that all of history was wrong, how would you present it to the world? Would you hold a news conference to outline the evidence? Publish a journal article for peer review with all of the data needed to understand the claim? Or would you create a nine-minute CGI video that you then ambiguously market to a “global Templar audience” as a strange hybrid of fact and fiction “based on a true story”? Obviously, you’d do the last of these because if you believe that you have completely rewritten history, chances are pretty good that you don’t know enough about evidence and logic and reason to know why you are wrong.

​In October of last year, A+E Networks filed a trademark application asking for priority consideration for their use of the clunky name Buried: Knights Templar and the Holy Grail for a new television series. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office moved with exceptional speed to grant A+E the use of the name, which they slapped on a program that began airing last week on the History channel as part of the network’s massive push to spread Templar-themed content across its television properties. This included the Knightfall drama series about the Templars, and a refocusing of Curse of Oak Island on fictitious Templar mysteries. All of this is part of what the channel’s head of programming described last year as an intentional push for Templar programming because of audience demand for it

​As we approach the New Year, it’s time to take a final look back at 2017 in fringe history. This was a year when political news overshadowed almost everything else, but 2017 still managed to find new ways to use and abuse history, rivalling the historic low of 2016. This year in fringe history might not have been more extreme than last year, but it was certainly darker. It was the year when fringe historians rejoiced that they had an ally in the White House whose courtiers proudly flew the banner of “alternative facts,” but more than anything, it was the year of Tom DeLonge, the musician turned ufologist who published an ancient astronaut book, launched a UFO research company, was crowned UFO researcher of the year, and took credit for the year’s biggest UFO research flap. Let’s look back at what happened over the past twelve months.

​Last night the History channel debuted its new series about the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail, Knightfall, a series designed to capitalize on the momentum generated by the network’s hit series Vikings and its core audience’s fascination with Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories. While critics offered mixed reviews of the series, many complained that the show was either dramatically inert or overly generic. Nevertheless, it is the first entry to build on Vikings to create a multipronged programming strategy designed to turn History into a full-service entertainment destination, where scripted shows provide an entry point for documentary features on the (quasi-) real history behind the story.

​Late last week novelist David S. Brody, who is a close colleague of former television personality Scott F. Wolter, posted on his blog what he called new information about the origins of the Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island, popularly known as the Newport Tower. Brody presented a quotation from Pocasset Wampanoag chief Daryl “Black Eagle” Jamieson, a younger man who has clearly been influenced by modern fringe history claims. Jamieson spoke with the Wolter/Brody wing of fringe history in 2015, and it is on his authority that Brody and Wolter claim that Native Americans have a centuries-old oral history of the medieval Earl Henry Sinclair of Orkney coming to America in the late 1300s. Specifically, here is what Black Eagle had to say in his own words:

​Longtime ancient astronaut theorist Erich von Däniken has a new book out this week called The Gods Never Left Us. However, it is being published by New Page Books, which has banned me from receiving review copies, so I am not able to review the book yet. I would be willing to bet, however, that I could completely make up a review based on von Däniken’s past work and no one would ever notice the difference. At the rate he churns them out, there can’t really be that much original material in any given book. This is especially likely since his next new book, Impossible Truths, is due out in January. The only thing special about The Gods Never Left Us is that it is being marketed as a direct sequel to Chariots of the Gods. And here, silly me, I thought his previous three dozen books on the same theme were sequels. The book description is unintentionally hilarious: “Can’t they leave us alone? And what makes it so difficult for us to acknowledge the existence of these extraterrestrials? That is what this book deals with.” Yes, why can’t they seem to leave poor old von Däniken alone? After all, he’s only gotten 34 volumes out of the “mystery.”

​Since the last of former television personality Scott Wolter’s TV shows went off the air, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to his musings, mostly because without a cable TV platform, he’s just another cranky voice on the internet with an amateur blog and little to say. That’s probably why it’s taken me two weeks to notice that Wolter appeared on Jimmy Church’s Fade to Black radio program, as he does frequently. I find these appearances to be exhausting because the show is three hours long, and who has that kind of time to listen to someone rant? If I wanted to hear three hours of crankiness and complaint, well, I have an infant son, so I already get enough of that. But now Wolter says he is plotting ten years of new television content, which I suppose means that I should pay at least some attention.

​The past season of the Yesterday channel and AHC channel British conspiracy documentary series Forbidden History was the most boring it has yet produced. This year’s topic selection leaned away from the outrageous pseudohistory that had marked the program since its 2013 debut as a sort of British version of America Unearthed. Instead, most of this year’s episodes revolved around twentieth century history, with episodes about Mussolini, Hitler, the Vatican, East European totalitarian governments, etc. The subject matter wasn’t of much interest to me, so I did not review the series when it aired a few weeks ago. I caught an episode on the Knights Templar in rerun this week. It first aired in July, and it exemplifies exactly how a formerly wild and crazy series went wrong